Alison Landsberg

Alison Landsberg is Professor of History and Cultural Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She is the author of Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (Columbia UP, 2015) and Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia UP, 2004) as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She is currently working on a project called “Post-Postracial America,” which examines the contemporary eruption of discourse about race on both the political left and the right, in the mass-mediated public sphere. Taken together, her body of research on museums, film, and television has focused on the modes of engagement they solicit from individuals and the possibilities therein for the production and acquisition of memory, historical knowledge and political subjectivity in the public sphere.

Dialectical Images and Counter-Temporalities: The Rewriting of US Racial Histories in American Mass Culture

Scholars of history on film, many of whom appear in this volume, have long argued for the power of the medium to shape and inform the way people think about the past. What I will point to here is the emergence of what I see as a novel form of history writing on film and television: a form of history writing not premised on the logics or temporality of historicism, and which is enabled by the formal, narrative, and most significantly temporal possibilities of these audiovisual texts. This form of history writing on film and television undermines the narrative of racial progress in ways that conventional academic history has been less able to do, in no small part because if its broader appeal and reach; and importantly, much of it has been undertaken by African American producers, directors, and actors, challenging what has become a hegemonic narrative of racial progress in the US, and a narrative that has remained largely intractable in the popular imagination. In this chapter I will argue that filmic and televisual texts, because they are formally adept at constructing alternative temporal relations, are uniquely able to bring unexpected pasts into contact with both the filmic, and extra-filmic (non-diegetic) present, staging visually and aurally, a “past” that we might not otherwise see as visibly and palpably animating the present.